When Donald starts pinning evidence to his corkboard, I creep upstairs and open my SingleMingle account. I gaze at the pixelated men. Some are smiling, with salt and wind in their hair. Others are introspective, reading a novel in a leather wingback chair. When I click next, a new one materializes. I click next again and again and again. There is an endless number of these men. My favorites are the ones who don’t have shirts on. Some even crop their heads off, leaving disembodied torsos moving across my screen.
Donald’s operation starts out small and consists mostly of warning signs he posts around the neighborhood. These signs show a dark figure with glowing eyes and the words “You Are Seen.”
Nevertheless, during the inspector’s next visit, while he is measuring the dampness of the cul-de-sac gutter, somebody keys his car. The next day, HausFlippr changes our safety rating from A to A- and drops our overall score five points.
Donald’s budget is quickly tripled.
He buys a dozen cameras from Discountsleuth.com and hides them around our property. One is slinked through the hose, looking out at the street. Two face our immediate neighbors’ houses through holes in the fence that Donald drills with an old dentist drill. One is hooked to the weathervane at the top of the house, providing a rotating view of the neighborhood as the wind blows.
The cameras snake down into the basement, where they are monitored by Donald and his two interns, Chet and Chad.
I use a fake zip code on my SingleMingle account. My user information is a lie. My height is shrunk an inch, my status marked “seductively single,” my eyes labeled hazel instead of green. I use photos that obscure my features, angles that make my nose look bigger or my hair a different shade of brown. If anyone who knew me saw my profile, they wouldn’t recognize me. Still, I make sure to browse strangers in other neighborhoods like North Forest and South Beach.
A man with the username OceanShoreStud27 catches my eye. His profile doesn’t have much information, but I want to know more. I plug his user photos into reverse image searches, find his other profiles on other sites. His name is Derek Carrington. He’s thirty-seven, a Libra, works in finance, has a blog devoted to his fishing catches. I check out his most played songs on WalkmanFM and a list of every movie he’s rated on Filmglutton.com.
What gets my heart truly racing is the satellite photo of his house. It’s only a few miles away and has a back porch and a pool. I zoom in as far as I can, until the pool’s blue hues are giant pixelated blocks. I imagine myself sitting by the pool with Derek, our twins splashing in the abstract art.
I come.
I organize the files on Derek, zip and encode them on a folder in my external hard drive.
Then I start searching again.
“Corrupt assholes!” Donald is pounding his fist into the refrigerator. He notices me in the doorway, gazes at my stomach. “What are the three of you craving? Fried chicken? Tacos? I can get one of the interns to make a run.”
I tell him Indian, and he sends Chet. He looks at me with that serious expression he gets when he’s unsure if I can handle what he wants to say. It’s my least favorite expression of his.
“A dog attacked Chad while he was attaching a new camera to the Yield to Children sign. We got a photo, but none of the neighbors will identify it.”
“People are protective of their pets.”
“The bastards are trying to stonewall me!” He hits his palm with his fist. “It’s not just violations, Margot. It’s vandalism. Crime. Drugs. Lord knows what else.”
He mistakes my confusion for worry. He comes over and touches my stomach with the backs of his hands. “Don’t worry, I won’t let anything happen to any of us.” He continues to rub my belly with his knuckles. I try to think of the last time those knuckles touched me in a place I wanted to be touched.
“I wish I could see what’s going on in there,” he says without looking up.
Despite Donald’s efforts, the incidents don’t stop. Someone toilet papers the Thompsons’ oak tree. A raccoon spills garbage across our cul-de-sac. Four yards have grown well beyond the allowable length. Donald calls in a half-dozen noise violations but can’t pin down the sources.
He has successes too. He catches the Jamesons’ cat urinating on the Abelsons’ rosebushes, gets little Sally Henderson to sign an affidavit that she left her Frisbee in the gutter.
When we bought this place, Middle Pond houses were valued higher than West Pond and nearly equal with East Pond. Now they’re no better than condos in South Creek.
Donald takes a temporary leave from his job. Says he’s going to focus on the family, on our protection.
The North Lake Proper Property Standards Guidebook is a tome. Donald and his interns keep finding new rules and violations. Worse, he thinks the neighbors are undermining his efforts. They keep ripping the cameras out of the street lamps and snapping the microphones on the fire hydrants.
“It’s probably just teens being teens,” I say over dinner. This is the only time we see each other anymore. I spend all my time upstairs in the bedroom, adding men to my folder, while Donald spends it in the basement, monitoring his wall of screens.
He doesn’t look up from his bowl of noodles. “Youth is no excuse for crime. If you don’t stop them now, they’ll be watching the world from behind bars.”
The nurse squirts the gel, fires up the machine.
I’m not sure what to think of the little objects on the screen. Intellectually, I know they’re our children. But they look like microbes in a microscope, inscrutable creatures from another world.
“Those are the hearts. Those are the brains,” the nurse is saying. She uses a little laser pointer on the screen.
“The checkup comes with prints, right?” Donald asks. “I want to be able to look at these whenever I need to.”
As my belly swells, my searching habits shift. I’ve gotten bored gathering information on strangers in distant neighborhoods, started to yawn seeing the photos of middle-aged men next to their cars and fireplaces. I move on from SingleMingle to other, more explicit, sites. Affluent Affairs, OkDungeon, WASPsGoneWild.
I set my zip code to Middle Pond, check in on the neighbors. Browsing close to home, I have to obscure myself further. I use photo-editing software to change the tint of my skin. I make sure there are no identifiable objects in the background of my selfies, or else gussy up my wall with dime-store decorations that I throw away after a snap. I get the latest encryption software to mask my IP.
The men on these sites are like me. They don’t reveal their faces, don’t give away identifying information. I stare at a hand or corner of a painting caught in the background of a photo and try to figure out who I’m looking at. Are those William Carlson’s pale thighs? Do those pubes curl how I’d imagine James Jacobson’s curl? Is that edge of cheek or lock of hair one I’ve seen at a neighborhood meeting?
The North Lake Committee on Proper Property Standards applauds Donald, gives him an award for excellence in property protection. He makes me come to the ceremony. It’s the first time we’ve been out together in weeks. These days, the twins move so much I’m peeing every thirty minutes. For the most part I stay upstairs, logged in.
As usual, Donald’s speech is overlong and mawkish, yet sprinkled with sharp wit. I’m too far along to drink but I try to will myself drunk by staring intensely at the glasses of merlot. I pee twice during the speech.